Q. and A.: Kerry Brown on Xi Jinping and the Business of China

The personality and intentions of Xi Jinping, China’s president and general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, are a subject of enduring curiosity, both at home and abroad. Some people, including many ordinary Chinese, admire Mr. Xi for his anticorruption campaign. Others criticize him for a harsh crackdown on domestic dissent.

Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat who is now a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, examines the Chinese leader in his coming book “CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.” In an interview, he discussed Mr. Xi’s ambitions, his supporters and adversaries, and the source of his power:

Q. What makes Xi Jinping “China’s C.E.O.”?

A. The [Communist] party is in power because it has been behind policies that have led to huge profits in China in the last few years. So this is a key part of its legitimacy, and means if we conceptualize it like a huge company, and Mr. Xi like its C.E.O., we get some sense of what its commercial, money-orientated strategy is. Despite the fact that it, and he, still has to use a language laden with vestiges of the ideological positions of the party in the past when it was more utopian and classically socialist in its outlook.

Q. You quote the soldier and writer T. E. Lawrence, who wrote: “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night ... wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” Is Mr. Xi a dreamer of the day?

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Kerry BrownCreditKerry Brown

A. Like Mao Zedong, I think Xi is always trying to emotionally recruit Chinese people and appeal to their idealistic side. In this way, he “dreams by day,” because underlying this is the harsh political reality that if you get Chinese people’s idealism, you get their souls, and you have a level of control that simply material inducements never give you. I think that is Mr. Xi’s ambition.

Q. How hard is it to write a biography of Mr. Xi?

A. One of the themes of Mr. Xi’s leadership has been the very explicit use of his own personal narrative and life story to justify his current leadership position. This is a very striking change. Chinese politics is now getting personal, and we have the return of charismatic leadership, again reminiscent of the Maoist era.

The question is whether under Mr. Xi the party institutions and internal governance can run this kind of highly attention-grabbing leadership without ending up being a hollowed-out vessel for a new kind of postmodern dictator. At the moment, it is hard to see clearly where the leadership style under Mr. Xi is heading.

Q. Mr. Xi has been likened to a second Mao Zedong in his leftward swerve. How can we be sure that what he says is what he actually means?

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A. There is every possibility that within the Communist Party there are complex undercurrents and moves against Mr. Xi. The anticorruption struggle has obviously cut against some major vested interests and created a group of resentful people. At the moment, they do not seem to pose a threat. But Chinese politics at the elite level is a vicious and bloody arena, with little space for compassion or mercy.

The people that Mr. Xi has to keep happy are not so much the membership of the party, but the emerging middle class who are so central to the transition of the country’s economic model to a more urban, service-sector, high-consuming model. These are the predominant group that figure in his thinking and the policy announcements of his government.

Q. Mr. Xi seems intent on enhancing the party’s authority. Will he succeed?

A. The mind-set of China’s current leaders is probably very hybrid on many issues, ranging from economic policy, to the role of the private sector, fiscal reform, etc. There is a spectrum of opinion amongst the elite 3,000 or so who actually run China now and have real budgetary and resource decision-making powers.

To the question, however, of what unites them, I think we can only say that they all have a strong vested interest, and therefore probably believe, in the unified party leadership being the only viable option for their being able to achieve their main goal: the construction of a rich, strong and powerful country within the next decades. Xi Jinping is not the new emperor of China. The Communist Party of China is.

Q. What are the practical consequences for the rest of the world?

A. In some ways, we are all reduced to strategic ambiguity over China, saying we want one thing — a democratic China — but actually wanting a stable, predictable partner, and one, therefore, that is likelier under the party. Simply because it is the current government in power, and any change will bring risk.